Hi, this is Perri…

remember me?  I am Perri Pappas, the girl from Greece, doing her internship by ProjectWizards and trying to learn all about Project Management and Merlin there is to know. Do you remember my jogger thoughts? I was jogging and thinking that my daily jogging training was a project I could setup in Merlin. While running I had mentally listed all activities thinkable, I had defined all linkages necessary, I used milestones to state the change of status of the various phases. I even considered publishing the project for the iPhone and entering the actuals on the run by the Merlin iPhone app. I was very happy about my project. I really thought my project plan was complete. Are you wondering why I speak in past tense?

Ach because I should have considered inserting some risk elements here and there. My project planing was not realistic enough. Only to give a sample of what I mean…

Right on the first activity ‘start of the day’  I should have entered a risk element of ‘rainy weather’ and a second one of ‘being lazy’. The impact of those risks can make my project results unusable and lead to deadline breaching. And that is exactly what they did the past few days 😉

So… when do you think about risks? When setting up a project plan, or at the end, when doing the closing documentation?